Celebrating the lowered head

It's April! Actually, it's almost May! But April is National Poetry Month, and I haven't posted one single poem to commemorate it. But in honor of a couple of fellow Taureans' birthdays this past week, I am now moved to share this one. Happy National Poetry Month. You have one more day to celebrate it.


Brooding Likeness

I was born in the month of the bull,
the month of heaviness,
or of the lowered, the destructive head,
or of purposeful blindness. So I know, beyond the shadowed
patch of grass, the stubborn one, the one who doesn't look up,
still senses the rejected world. It is
a stadium, a well of dust. And you who watch him
looking down in the face of death, what do you know
of commitment? If the bull lives
one controlled act of revenge, be satisfied
that in the sky, like you, he is always moving,
not of his own accord but through the black field
like grit caught on a wheel, like shining freight.

--Louise Glück, from The Triumph of Achilles (1985)